Converting Paper Drawings to CAD

Changing Industry

Though the medium of design has now shifted from the sketchpad to the screen, there are still those who prefer to sketch by hand. Nonetheless, it’s rare to find anyone within the design industry who produces a hard copy of a design without a digital file to back it up. After all, paper drawings are just physical records. Designers and engineers need to convert these drawings to fully editable vector designs so they can use them in CAD. This guide covers everything you need to know about scanning a design into the computer, and converting the resulting raster file into a CAD-friendly vector format.

Why choose to CAD over Paper

There are several instances where scanned drawings to CAD conversion becomes necessary. One commonn scenario involves old technical drawings or architectural plans. Your studio may have won a contract to develop part of a site further. The trouble is, all of the previous plans were drawn on physical paper, rather than on a program like AutoCAD. In such an instance, you could begin by manually drawing the designs in your preferred software, and going from there. However, this would require a huge commitment of time and energy, which would be better spent editing the initial design to the client’s new specifications. A more efficient method would be to use the technological advances that are present in Hand Drawings To CAD, which allow you to automatically convert a scanned paper drawing to a CAD format. The same principle applies to hand-drawn sketches, or any other design that has been produced on paper.

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